Tech billionaires got rich off us. Now they want to feed us the crumbs

fullyautomated-luxurycommunism:

Even if every kind of work is abolished by automation, with robots raising our children, growing our crops, and cleaning our teeth, there will be political decisions to be made about what kind of society we want. In the world imagined by the UBI tech elite, those decisions would inevitably be made by the people who own the robots – in other words, them. At best, this might resemble a benevolent dictatorship, where a small class of “wealth creators” manufactures and maintains the machines that make it possible for everybody else to lead workless lives. They’d give us an allowance to live on, and keep the rest for themselves.

If you believe that wealth is essentially a private product, produced by individuals, then such an arrangement might seem fair. But in a modern economy, wealth is produced by society as a whole – and nowhere is this fact more apparent than in the case of the tech industry. Ever since the US military funded Silicon Valley into existence after the second world war, the tech industry has fed on a steady stream of public goods. Those goods might be government research, mined for profitable inventions, or the contents of your Gmail inbox and Facebook feed, mined for advertising revenue. What matters is they’re free, and they’re free because we give them away. If the robots ever arrive, their arrival will be bankrolled by our taxes, our attention, our data.

Under these circumstances, a basic income would be the crumbs left by the bully who steals your sandwich. Better to keep the sandwich for ourselves. Better to own the robots collectively, and allocate the surplus democratically, than leave society’s wealth in the hands of its luckiest members.

Tech billionaires got rich off us. Now they want to feed us the crumbs